National signing day for high-school football prospects has passed. The March Madness basketball tournament looms just over the horizon. Public scandals and patterns of inappropriate behavior among college athletes made headlines in 2016. Is it time to take stock of what we in the world of higher education have created and assess whether the emphasis placed on athletics in universities is excessive, if not totally out of control? I’m asking this as someone who participated in two college sports and who even today follows sports closely.

The money that exchanges hands in the college-sports world is exorbitant. In 41 states, the highest-paid public employee is not a professor, neurosurgeon, or politician, but rather a college football or basketball coach. Jim Harbaugh, who leads the Michigan Wolverines’ football program, was reportedly paid $9 million in 2016. The team performed well on the field, and two of Harbaugh’s assistants were also reportedly compensated with near million-dollar salaries. And the Big House is far from the only institution cutting huge checks. In 2014, National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) revenues totaled nearly $1 billion, most of which came from television-rights agreements; far less came from attendance at college-sporting events.

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And yet, despite the swollen bank accounts associated with college athletics and the large crowds that flock to high-profile games, very few universities come out in the black from support of athletics by fans and boosters. True, universities are always looking for new sources of revenue, but intercollegiate athletics turn out not to be a profitable path. Derek Bok, the former president of Harvard, opined: “Only a handful of institutions have consistently earned a surplus from big-time intercollegiate athletics if the costs involved are fully accounted for.”

In addition to these monetary woes, strings of scandals have plagued schools both big and small in recent years, highlighting the broken higher-education experiences many student-athletes face. In 2016, Harvard announced it was canceling its men’s soccer season because of allegations that players had written sexually explicit “scouting reports,” which graded recruits of the women’s soccer team based on appearance. Not to be outdone, Columbia suspended its wrestling team for similar reasons. Princeton also suspended its men’s swimming and diving teams for “misogynistic and racist” materials created by team members, and Amherst did the same for its men’s cross-country team.

Outside the Ivy League, the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, is one of the most innovative universities in the nation, having created, for example, the first social-science research organization in the country. Yet it has admitted that for years it created fictional courses for student-athletes: Academic advisers and professors funneled athletes into those so-called “paper” classes. The courses didn’t actually exist, and athletes were given the “high grades” required to ensure their on-field eligibility. Though the school admitted to wrongdoing, the NCAA has not meted out any penalties for these violations. The case is still pending, despite several NCAA inquiries and details chronicled and published by a Chapel Hill professor and his colleague who worked on academic counseling at UNC-Chapel Hill. Perhaps North Carolina is just too valuable a source of television and other NCAA revenues for it “to fail”—that is, for it to be severely sanctioned and disciplined for its transgression of ethics and NCAA rules.

Arizona State University gives athletic scholarships to just over 1 percent of a class of first-time freshmen.

Further diluting the mirage that student-athletes actually receive a quality education is the “one-and-done” principle that college basketball leverages during recruitment. The best young players—who are not designated as “international” by the league’s standards—are eligible for the National Basketball Association during the calendar year they turn 19, provided they are at least a year out of high school.

Most large Division I universities offer athletic scholarships to most of the members of their sports teams; there are relatively few “walk on” players who were never recruited and make the teams. Most universities offer athletic scholarships only to a small percentage of those in the entering class—Arizona State University, for example, gives athletic scholarships to just over 1 percent of a given class of 12,000 first-time freshmen, according to Mike Crow, the school’s president. However, ironically, many of the most selective colleges and universities in the nation, including the Ivies and the elite colleges like Amherst and Williams, have more intercollegiate teams than the Division I powerhouses and typically allocate a sizable percentage of their precious spots to recruited athletes whose SAT scores—at least in the high-profile sports of football, basketball, and hockey—are often lower than the mean of the class.

Division I intercollegiate athletic programs are “buying out” the base expenses of professional sports leagues. So, youngsters playing one to four years of college basketball, football, or baseball, require less player development by professional leagues (particularly the NBA, Major League Baseball, the NFL, and the NHL). This is one reason the number of minor-league teams has shrunk over the decades. While the professional leagues benefit from this system, the universities become temporary training grounds for potential professional athletes.

Intercollegiate athletics is an important part of university life. It can produce social cohesion on campuses that otherwise can’t bind students together because of other campus conflicts. And on the grounds that humans can have multiple intelligences, many athletes embody a form of “bodily-kinesthetic” intelligence that is rare in the population. Michael Jordan was as intelligent at basketball as Drew Faust is as president of Harvard.

But in today’s athletics arms race, have America’s universities created too much of a good thing? Has the concept of the student-athlete simply disappeared? Universities today are commercializing athletics to the point where they are essentially running professional teams. And, they are exploiting hundreds of athletes—using their images for profit—by making their scholarships dependent on participation. These athletes often come from disadvantaged groups who receive little attention from their universities after they have failed to graduate or to make it as pro-athletes. In effect, higher education has perverted some of its core values—to rigorously teach academic subject matter, prepare better citizens, and improve their independent thinking and their critical reasoning skills.

The highly selective colleges ought to withdraw from the NCAA.

The problem that the country faces with intercollegiate athletics today is in fact not a single one for all colleges and universities. Those that are large and have developed nationally ranked, highly visible programs face the problem of over-professionalization and commercialization. Those that are lodged in the “highly selective” category are admitting too many athletes and potentially denying admissions to extraordinarily able foreign and minority students, as well as future artists and writers and political scientists and economists and engineers. This choice deprives these universities of the greatest possible diversity of students and talents that could increase still further vitality and differences in points of view both inside and outside the classroom.

Change can happen. For the highly selective colleges and universities, the leaders ought to roll back the percentage of recruited athletes. If selective colleges wish to maintain a few high-profile sports, they should adopt the Stanford model for financial aid. At Stanford, for example, recruited athletes receive scholarships, but if they decide not to play, they enter the regular financial-aid pool. As I wrote in my book Toward a More Perfect University, they are then treated like any other student: Their financial aid is based entirely on their need.

The highly selective colleges ought to withdraw from the NCAA and form their own league since they are not trying to build national championship programs. They should not actively recruit athletes. The Ivies and similar colleges and universities would eliminate some sports from their portfolios—these schools support far more sports than, say, the University of Alabama, whose athletics website lists 15 sports. (Harvard’s, by comparison, lists 40.) The idea is to recreate a competitive athletic landscape of true student-athletes, whether the athlete is enrolled in a state or private university.

The NCAA needs a complete rethinking and overhaul. More time and effort ought to be spent, for example, in showing off the fantastic women’s basketball, volleyball, softball, and swimming teams. In the 1950s its bylaws stated: “Student participation in intercollegiate athletics is an avocation, and student-athletes should be protected from exploitation by professional and commercial enterprises.” This noble idea is now seen more in the breach than in conformity to its principles.

Finally, university leaders should consider forming special institutions located in different geographic areas that are devoted almost entirely to athletics and bodily-kinesthetic intelligence. These students would be prospective professional athletes who would be paid for their work as athletes, or students who wish to work in various parts of the sports industry. This would eliminate the pretense that many of these young athletes are truly interested in other parts of the curriculum. Of course, I can point to many athletes from elite schools who did go on to successful careers outside of athletics and some few have even made it in the professional leagues, but in many of the scholarship schools, they are there principally for athletics and they are quickly forgotten by those at the university once they leave.

It’s time for universities to take a close look at their athletic programs and assess what they would like those programs to be within the context of the larger goals of a college and university.

This article is part of our Next America: Higher Education project, which is supported by grants from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and Lumina Foundation.

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Five times a day for the past three months, an app called WeCroak has been telling me I’m going to die. It does not mince words. It surprises me at unpredictable intervals, always with the same blunt message: “Don’t forget, you’re going to die.”

Sending these notices is WeCroak’s sole function. They arrive “at random times and at any moment just like death,” according to the app’s website, and are accompanied by a quote meant to encourage “contemplation, conscious breathing or meditation.” Though the quotes are not intended to induce nausea and despair, this is sometimes their effect. I’m eating lunch with my husband one afternoon when WeCroak presents a line from the Zen poet Gary Snyder: “The other side of the ‘sacred’ is the sight of your beloved in the underworld, dripping with maggots.”

The president is the common thread between the recent Republican losses in Alabama, New Jersey, and Virginia.

Roy Moore was a uniquely flawed and vulnerable candidate. But what should worry Republicans most about his loss to Democrat Doug Jones in Tuesday’s U.S. Senate race in Alabama was how closely the result tracked with the GOP’s big defeats last month in New Jersey and Virginia—not to mention how it followed the pattern of public reaction to Donald Trump’s perpetually tumultuous presidency.

Jones beat Moore with a strong turnout and a crushing lead among African Americans, a decisive advantage among younger voters, and major gains among college-educated and suburban whites, especially women. That allowed Jones to overcome big margins for Moore among the key elements of Trump’s coalition: older, blue-collar, evangelical, and nonurban white voters.

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The large, sunny room at Volgograd State University smelled like its contents: 45 college students, all but one of them male, hunched over keyboards, whispering and quietly clacking away among empty cans of Juicy energy drink. “It looks like they’re just picking at their screens, but the battle is intense,” Victor Minin said as we sat watching them.

Clustered in seven teams from universities across Russia, they were almost halfway into an eight-hour hacking competition, trying to solve forensic problems that ranged from identifying a computer virus’s origins to finding secret messages embedded in images. Minin was there to oversee the competition, called Capture the Flag, which had been put on by his organization, the Association of Chief Information Security Officers, or ARSIB in Russian. ARSIB runs Capture the Flag competitions at schools all over Russia, as well as massive, multiday hackathons in which one team defends its server as another team attacks it. In April, hundreds of young hackers participated in one of them.

Brushing aside attacks from Democrats, GOP negotiators agree on a late change in the tax bill that would reduce the top individual income rate even more than originally planned.

For weeks, Republicans have brushed aside the critique—brought by Democrats and backed up by congressional scorekeepers and independent analysts—that their tax plan is a bigger boon to the rich than a gift to the middle class.

On Wednesday, GOP lawmakers demonstrated their confidence as clearly as they could, by giving a deeper tax cut to the nation’s top earners.

A tentative agreement struck by House and Senate negotiators would reduce the highest marginal tax rate to 37 percent from 39.6 percent, in what appears to be the most significant change to the bills passed by each chamber in the last month. The proposal final tax bill would also reduce the corporate tax rate from 35 percent to 21 percent, rather than the 20 percent called for in the initial House and Senate proposals, according to a Republican aide privy to the private talks.

If Democratic candidate Doug Jones had lost to GOP candidate Roy Moore, weakened as he was by a sea of allegations of sexual assault and harassment, then some of the blame would have seemed likely to be placed on black turnout.

But Jones won, according to the Associated Press, and that script has been flipped on its head. Election Day defied the narrative and challenged traditional thinking about racial turnout in off-year and special elections. Precincts in the state’s Black Belt, the swathe of dark, fertile soil where the African American population is concentrated, long lines were reported throughout the day, and as the night waned and red counties dominated by rural white voters continued to report disappointing results for Moore, votes surged in from urban areas and the Black Belt. By all accounts, black turnout exceeded expectations, perhaps even passing previous off-year results. Energy was not a problem.

There’s a fiction at the heart of the debate over entitlements: The carefully cultivated impression that beneficiaries are simply receiving back their “own” money.

One day in 1984, Kurt Vonnegut called.

I was ditching my law school classes to work on the presidential campaign of Walter Mondale, the Democratic candidate against Ronald Reagan, when one of those formerly-ubiquitous pink telephone messages was delivered to me saying that Vonnegut had called, asking to speak to one of Mondale’s speechwriters.

All sorts of people called to talk to the speechwriters with all sorts of whacky suggestions; this certainly had to be the most interesting. I stared at the 212 phone number on the pink slip, picked up a phone, and dialed.

A voice, so gravelly and deep that it seemed to lie at the outer edge of the human auditory range, rasped, “Hello.” I introduced myself. There was a short pause, as if Vonnegut were fixing his gaze on me from the other end of the line, then he spoke.

So many people watch porn online that the industry’s carbon footprint might be worse now that it was in the days of DVDs and magazines.

Online streaming is a win for the environment. Streaming music eliminates all that physical material—CDs, jewel cases, cellophane, shipping boxes, fuel—and can reduce carbon-dioxide emissions by 40 percent or more. Video streaming is still being studied, but the carbon footprint should similarly be much lower than that of DVDs.

Scientists who analyze the environmental impact of the internet tout the benefits of this “dematerialization,” observing that energy use and carbon-dioxide emissions will drop as media increasingly can be delivered over the internet. But this theory might have a major exception: porn.

Since the turn of the century, the pornography industry has experienced two intense hikes in popularity. In the early 2000s, broadband enabled higher download speeds. Then, in 2008, the advent of so-called tube sites allowed users to watch clips for free, like people watch videos on YouTube. Adam Grayson, the chief financial officer of the adult company Evil Angel, calls the latter hike “the great mushroom-cloud porn explosion of 2008.”

In The Emotional Life of the Toddler, the child-psychology and psychotherapy expert Alicia F. Lieberman details the dramatic triumphs and tribulations of kids ages 1 to 3. Some of her anecdotes make the most commonplace of experiences feel like they should be backed by a cinematic instrumental track. Take Lieberman’s example of what a toddler feels while walking across the living room:

When Johnny can walk from one end of the living room to the other without falling even once, he feels invincible. When his older brother intercepts him and pushes him to the floor, he feels he has collapsed in shame and wants to bite his attacker (if only he could catch up with him!) When Johnny’s father rescues him, scolds the brother, and helps Johnny on his way, hope and triumph rise up again in Johnny’s heart; everything he wants seems within reach. When the exhaustion overwhelms him a few minutes later, he worries that he will never again be able to go that far and bursts into tears.

Will the vice president—and the religious right—be rewarded for their embrace of Donald Trump?

No man can serve two masters, the Bible teaches, but Mike Pence is giving it his all. It’s a sweltering September afternoon in Anderson, Indiana, and the vice president has returned to his home state to deliver the Good News of the Republicans’ recently unveiled tax plan. The visit is a big deal for Anderson, a fading manufacturing hub about 20 miles outside Muncie that hasn’t hosted a sitting president or vice president in 65 years—a fact noted by several warm-up speakers. To mark this historic civic occasion, the cavernous factory where the event is being held has been transformed. Idle machinery has been shoved to the perimeter to make room for risers and cameras and a gargantuan American flag, which—along with bleachers full of constituents carefully selected for their ethnic diversity and ability to stay awake during speeches about tax policy—will serve as the TV-ready backdrop for Pence’s remarks.

More comfortable online than out partying, post-Millennials are safer, physically, than adolescents have ever been. But they’re on the brink of a mental-health crisis.

One day last summer, around noon, I called Athena, a 13-year-old who lives in Houston, Texas. She answered her phone—she’s had an iPhone since she was 11—sounding as if she’d just woken up. We chatted about her favorite songs and TV shows, and I asked her what she likes to do with her friends. “We go to the mall,” she said. “Do your parents drop you off?,” I asked, recalling my own middle-school days, in the 1980s, when I’d enjoy a few parent-free hours shopping with my friends. “No—I go with my family,” she replied. “We’ll go with my mom and brothers and walk a little behind them. I just have to tell my mom where we’re going. I have to check in every hour or every 30 minutes.”

Those mall trips are infrequent—about once a month. More often, Athena and her friends spend time together on their phones, unchaperoned. Unlike the teens of my generation, who might have spent an evening tying up the family landline with gossip, they talk on Snapchat, the smartphone app that allows users to send pictures and videos that quickly disappear. They make sure to keep up their Snapstreaks, which show how many days in a row they have Snapchatted with each other. Sometimes they save screenshots of particularly ridiculous pictures of friends. “It’s good blackmail,” Athena said. (Because she’s a minor, I’m not using her real name.) She told me she’d spent most of the summer hanging out alone in her room with her phone. That’s just the way her generation is, she said. “We didn’t have a choice to know any life without iPads or iPhones. I think we like our phones more than we like actual people.”